So a lot of you probably read about the hack attack on Karl Kerschl's site last week as reported by FLEEN.  Wordpress has come to take a fairly dominant position in webcomics publishing in recent years with good reason.  Wordpress is a fantastic blogging solution with an active development team and it's not a tremendous stretch to leverage it for comics.  So which comics-specific solution should you use for turning Wordpress into Webcomicpress? 

First let's see what is out there.  If there are other projects out there to include beyond what I list below, contact me.

1.  Comicpress.  Tyler Martin's Comicpress wasn't the first Wordpress effort but it was the one that caught fire and is now in wide use in webcomics.  It's gone through several versions and now has a few add-on plug-ins for additional features.  Version 2.8 is stable and in wide use.

2.  stripShow.  I think Brad Hawkins' stripShow might have been the first working hack I can recall.  Currently, it looks like Hawkins is working on version 2.5, so it's probably a safe bet to wait until that next version is released to try it out.

3.  Manga+Press.  I know the least about this one, having not had a chance to try it out.  It also looks like the most recent version is in beta and the creator still working to finish a final release of what will be version 2.6.

4. Webcomic 2.1.  This project has been around for a bit, it seems to have been inspired in part by the creator's criticisms of Comicpress.

5. Comic Reef.  The very most recent effort I'm aware of seems to be a project born in the Webcomics Community forums.

What I think would be the most useful approach to comparing them is to create a list of features and see each package implements them.  Some obvious issues are how it handles comic images, navigation, themes... again, let me know if you have any suggestions for key criteria.  I'll be working on setting up each one of these packages in order to write up a comparison of them for later this month.

read more